I will remove the compatibility with XP, Vista and Windows Server 2003 in hMailServer 5.7.

Going forward, when a new hMailServer version is released I will drop support for any OS which is no longer supported by Microsoft. Windows Server 2003 for example hasn't been receiving security updates since 2015.

I imagine there are many that are using legacy OS's for running hmailserver as a standalone mailserver. Given that hMailserver is free, and not upgrading (just because M$ forces you) also remains free, I can fairly see why this would be the choice of many. Removing support for running on Server 2003/XP etc might well alienate those and you effectively force people to invest (effectively cutting off their choice to resist forced expenditure due to running windows).

On behalf of freedom of choice (within the Windows environment), if it means stopping HMS running on these OS's then personally Im against the idea if it can be avoided.

Given that hMailserver is free, and not upgrading (just because M$ forces you) also remains free, I can fairly see why this would be the choice of many. Removing support for running on Server 2003/XP etc might well alienate those and you effectively force people to invest (effectively cutting off their choice to resist forced expenditure due to running windows).

I would bet for the larger portion of those people it's more about "if it ain't broke don't fix it" and less about the money. The amazing thing about this software is it's reliability. Once in a while i see questions here from people like that with systems 10 + years old and the only reason they upgrade is because of a hardware failure or something in the environment changed forcing them to follow suite.

I would guess most of the people that are not routinely upgrading windows are also not routinely upgrading hmailserver.

There's nothing inherent in hMailServer 5.7 (right now) which doesn't work with 64-bit versions of XP/2013 and Vista. The main reasons I would want to drop it is:

* To actually support it continuously is quite a lot of work test-wise, because I would need to test features and database connectivity with those versions of Windows. Like upgrading from old versions, MySQL, PGSQL, MSSQL.

* Another aspect is compatibility with 3rd party libraries. Boost (which hMailServer relies on) relies on Windows API for cryptography. For 5.6.8, I had to explicitly configure Boost to use older and I think more unsafe API's for cryptography. So even if you run Windows 10, hMailServer will use older API's to be backwards compatible with Windows XP. The same applies to the usage of OpenSSL, where hMailServer has been compiled with flags to enable weak ciphers, because those are the only available on Windows XP. (The user can disable weak ciphers in the UI, but there's still a risk of bad config). These things are drawbacks for hMailserver users, regardless of Windows versions.

* Similarly, as long as hMailServer is XP compatible, it must continue to use an old version of .NET and can't take advantage of newer features (like high DPI, etc).

I could of course remove the blocker in the installer and just show a message dialog that "hMailServer is not tested on your version of Windows", but that may have negative impact if some user is running it in production and then upgrade and everything stops working. 5.6(.0) was released 5 years ago so I think at this point moving on is OK. Users still on XP are probably unlikely to "jump on" 5.7 as soon as it gets out.